Hamish Campbell on the #openweb and rebooting indymedia
Hamish Campbell, a veteran of radical media for more than 30 years, argues that mainstream technology and culture are failing us. The rise of the #dotcon platforms has commodified our lives: closed silos like #Facebook and #Instagram harvest our attention and data, locking us into systems that serve profit, not people.
Attempts to build alternatives around an #encryptionist agenda have gone nowhere. As a result, the tech giants dominate. For Campbell, the answer lies in the #openweb – once born open, but now slowly suffocated over the past two decades. His solution is to reboot grassroots media.
Drawing on the example of Oxford #IMC, Campbell shows how a simple federated network can thrive: content is shared through trusted link flows, moderation happens collectively, and mistakes can be rolled back. Unlike the #closedweb, the beauty of the #openweb is its free-flowing links, its openness to serendipity and collaboration.
For Campbell, the #OMN project is most powerful not for what it does, but for what it refuses to do: it rejects capture, centralisation, and gatekeeping. Change begins with small, practical steps, rebooting grassroots media as a living example.
What You Can Do
In recent years, events in the US, Portugal, and Madrid have explored the idea of #rebooting#Indymedia. So far, the history of Indymedia has been told mainly by academics, often through a narrow, American lens. To truly revive it, we need to retell those stories more widely, and more honestly.
A successful reboot means returning to Indymedia’s open and serendipitous roots, not the bureaucratic, closed structures it later became. The good news is that most of the technical tools we need already exist, from federated protocols like ActivityPub to peer-to-peer networks like dat.
To keep its radical, grassroots character intact, any reboot must follow the #4opens: open data, open process, open access, and open source. These principles ensure transparency, accessibility, and trust.
If you want to get involved, search for #indymediaback or “reboot Indymedia” to find links, projects, and discussions around the #OMN.
The project i like to point to as an example. The indymedia project, an early alt-media network that spread the use of open source software and #4opens organizing around the world at the turn of the century. In the UK the was a #geekproblem vs #openweb fight that became nasty over what we would now understand as “activertypub” the #Fediverse vs more centralized silo approach. In the UK you can see this stress point fought as a proxy war over #RSS
The #openweb aggregation side were sold a dud by the #fashernistas being swayed by the #geekproblem It was obvious that the project had to change and move away from central servers to a more aggregation model. BUT the movement was torpedoed by an obviously pointless open-source project instead of implementing an existing standards based RSS they created their BETTER, BRIGHTER flavour which was of course incomparable with everyone else.
This is an example of a “better” but obviously pointless open source project and also destructive behaver. The #indymedia project in the UK was ripped apart internally from this same divide in the end. A bad “open source” outcome. You can find similar behaver today in the fediverse if you look.
It’s a interesting thing to look at. Actually you can see 3 active sides in the internal uk #indymedia mess and important to see the outcome that they ALL LOST in the end.
3 events at newspeak house this winter: Session 1) Looking back – how technology shaped the production and distribution of radical/progressive media like #Undercurrents, #Indymedia etc.
Session 2) The current day – failure of radical media technology. The rise of the #dotcons and the new alt-media projects.
Session 3) Looking forward – The #activetypub meetup. This is an update on the state of current #openweb projects. A continuation of the very successful #Mastodon meetups that I set up last year, opening up to the wider projects like #Peertube, #Pleroma, #Pixalfeed etc.
What kind of format do you imagine?
First two would be presentation, with long Q&A sessions and feedback from other participants that arrive on the day. Following the successful meetups last year, the last session is a user group go round with a few lightening talks and Q&A.
Session 1) I’m planning to invite one of the founders of both Undercurrents and #IMC to speak. I was also involved in both, so we would have 3 perspectives. I would have to cover the expenses of these speakers.
Session 2) I’m currently looking for speakers. I can talk/guide on this subject to shape the agenda to the subject.
Session 3) We have a list of people to invite from our meetup group from last year, so it will be a continuity user group meetup with fresh outreach.
And who do you imagine as your target audience?
Session 1) People who were involved (a lot) in the production and distribution of radical/progressive media. Historians (a few), and people interested in the 3 workshops and the subject of tech and politics in general.
Session 2) The same people from the first session will come to the second one, plus next generation who built good things inside the #doctons (for example UK uncut, student protests, current radical media projects and their ordinances).
Session 3) The same people from the first two sessions, plus the people running the Mastodon instances. Both developers and users, as well as the new alt media producers to connect with the developers/sysadmins
For outreach, there will be two bites of the cherry, the publicity for the event and the publicity for each of the sessions.
The Genoa G8 Summit protests, held from July 18 to 22, 2001, were a turning point in the global justice movement. More than 200,000 people converged on the medieval port city to block the summit and challenge the concentrated power of the world’s richest nations. A gathering of the priests of the #deathcult, grinding the planet into dust for profit.
For many of us, the G8 represented everything wrong with the world: an unelected body shaping economic and social policy for billions without legitimacy, accountability, or consent. We traveled to Genoa not as isolated activists but as a flowing living ecosystem of movements, anarchists, trade unionists, farmers, climate campaigners, media collectives, migrants’ rights groups, students, pacifists, the lot. We were there to resist and to build alternatives in the cracks protest pushes wider.
Arriving in a besieged city, Genoa a few days before the demonstrations to help set up the Media Center, for grassroots reporting. Genoa, though, felt nothing like a holiday town. Police were everywhere. Riot vans on street corners. Helicopters thudding overhead. The protest convergence center was being built on the beach; just 100 yards away from the stadium, where police forces were massing in their thousands. Walking around felt like moving inside a tightening fist.
We slept in the camper van that first night, tucked beside a half-built marquee. At dawn, we joined the organisers at the Diaz school, the building that housed both the Genoa Social Forum and the Media Centre.
We requisition two PCs from other rooms, installed video editing softwer, and turned them into the only two shared editing stations in the building. One was upgraded with a new hard drive and FireWire card for DV footage, not that it mattered, because it broke on day two and never recovered. The analogue capture system we had brought did most of the work that went online.
On one of our first reporting trips, filming outside the police barracks beside the convergence centre, we were detained by undercover cops. More arrived. Then more. Ten or twelve by the end. They demanded our tapes. I refused. They checked our documents, questioned us for hours, and released us without charge. I secretly filmed some of them; two would resurface later outside the IMC on the night of the raid.
Driving around the city to document the expanding “red zone” – the militarised area blocking off the summit – we were detained twice more. Civil rights meant nothing here. The police behaved like a sovereign power unto themselves. That Orwellian twinge – the sense that you are inside a lawless machine – grew stronger every day.
When the city turned red, one protester, Carlo Giuliani, was shot dead by police. Fear rippled across the city. The #IMC became a space threaded with arguments about what to do. People drifted away, hour by hour, some deciding the risks were too great. By midnight the centre had half emptied.
Then the screams came: “THE POLICE ARE COMING!”
Looking out the window, I saw nothing at first. Panic surged anyway, people barricading doors, grabbing bags, racing up staircases. Marion moved the archive tapes to the hiding place I’d scouted earlier: the water tower on the roof.
From the rooftop I filmed carabinieri smashing into the building next door, the Diaz Pertini school, with vans and sledgehammers. Chairs were used to break windows. Tables became battering rams. It was happening fast, shockingly fast. Then I saw them entering our stairwell.
The Diaz Raid: Running for our lives. I headed downstairs to check if the Media Center itself was being stormed. Turning the stairwell corner, I came face-to-face with a fully armoured carabiniere charging upward, truncheon raised, panting with adrenaline. I spun and bolted. Two flights up, shouting, “They’re in the building!” I sprinted to the roof and slipped into the tower.
Inside the darkness, I whispered for Marion. No answer. I crept through the corridor of water tanks, lit only by the IR beam from my camera. Finally, a small, terrified voice: “Turn the light off.” She had hidden behind the last tank, clutching tapes and equipment.
For hours, three, maybe four, we lay silent as the helicopter’s spotlight swept the windows. Police boots thudded across the roof. Below us, the city echoed with screams, crashes, and the chanted word “ASSASSINI.”
When the helicopter finally left, we emerged. The rooftop was scattered with stunned survivors. Downstairs, the destruction was total. Computers smashed. Hard drives ripped out. Doors hanging loose. The walls of the Diaz school across the street were painted with blood. Skin and hair stuck to corners. Piles of clothing soaked red. People moving like ghosts.
The Carabinieri had left their calling card.
What happened inside that school, was not policing. It was torture, humiliation, and fascist ritual. Ninety-three sleeping demonstrators were beaten so badly that the floors resembled a slaughterhouse. People hiding under tables or sleeping in bags were clubbed unconscious. A 65-year-old woman’s arm was broken. One student needed surgery for brain bleeding. Others had their teeth kicked out. One officer cut clumps of hair from victims as trophies.
Those who survived were taken to Bolzaneto detention centre, where the abuse continued: beatings, stress positions, pepper spray, threats of rape, and forced chants of “Viva il Duce!” and “Viva Pinochet!” A systematic, organised brutality. This wasn’t loss of control, it was ideology.
Aftermath: Truth in the Ruins. The Italian state tried to bury it all. But survivors, lawyers, journalists, and prosecutors fought for years. The European Court of Human Rights eventually ruled that Italy had committed grave human rights violations. But almost none of the officers served jail time. Politicians escaped entirely.
The police weren’t out of control. They were following a logic, the logic of protecting elitists power against democratic dissent. The logic of the #deathcult. The logic that treats people as obstacles, not citizens. Genoa showed the world what happens when movements gain too much momentum: the mask drops.
And still, in that chaos, seeds were planted – #indymedia, #OMN, the global justice movement, the early #openweb – messy, hopeful, compost for future uprisings.
